Screenwriting

COVERSCRIPT TIPS – Get out of your Chair

Get out of your chair and down into the trenches with your characters. It will change the way you write for the better.

If you write your characters from the safety and comfort of your chair as if you’re their omniscient, objective god, observing and manipulating them through the story, moving them like so many pieces on a game board, they won’t evoke an emotional response in your audience.

Stands to reason that if you aren’t suffering, feeling, laughing, sobbing, screaming, pondering, loving, et cetera along with your characters, they aren’t evoking an emotional response in you. So how do you expect them, in turn, to evoke an emotional response in your audience?

If you’re detached while you write, your audience will be detached while they read the screenplay or watch the film.

But if you write as if you are the characters, smack dab in the story, right there bleeding, crying, screaming, laughing or rejoicing as one of them, you’ll take the audience on that same emotional ride.

That’s when the audience experiences the events, the drama, the suspense, the tension, the comedy as if they’re there, too.